Take a Hike: Carlsbad North Oaks

CARLSBAD  Carlsbad Oaks North Trail is a good place to head for your lunch hour if you work nearby.

Hikers, bicyclists and dogs on leashes are all welcome to this soft-surface trail that winds through a conservation area set aside when Carlsbad Oaks North properties were developed for businesses.

Carlsbad Oaks North Trail

Before you go: Download a map of this trail from Carlsbad’s trails pages on the web at the Carlsbad city site.

Trailhead: From Interstate 5, exit at Palomar Airport Road and head east. Turn left on El Fuerte Street and head to its intersection with Faraday Avenue. Park in the small parking area next to the pump station at the southeast corner of Faraday Avenue and El Fuerte Street.

Distance: The trail runs 1.3 miles one-way for about a 2.6-mile round-trip hike.

Difficulty: Easy to moderate.

The 1.3-mile trail sits in 326 acres of the habitat conservation area; 108 acres of the western portion are owned by San Diego County while the 218 acres in the eastern portion are owned by the Center for Natural Lands Management (CNLM), a private, nonprofit corporation dedicated to protecting and sustaining native species and their habitats.

The trail is maintained by the city of Carlsbad. It’s a wide old dirt road, essentially, that sits a bit above the Agua Hedionda Creek that runs through the site.

Along that riparian habitat are lots of coast live oak trees as well as some willows. In the coastal sage scrub and chaparral habitats on the steep hillsides are such sensitive plants as San Diego thornmint and thread-leaved brodiaea. The California gnatcatcher lives here and lots of red-tailed hawks.

“Much of the available habitat within the preserve is in good condition,” says a report from CNLM posted at the south end of the trail. “To keep this condition, the preserve manager must regularly control weeds like Pampas grass, Mexican fan palm, sweet fennel and artichoke thistle, among others.”

I saw lots of that tall yellow sweet fennel at the very northern end of the trail, but this short part of the trail may as well be avoided. I began at that northern end very near El Fuerte and Faraday, next to the pump station where there’s a small parking lot.

From that parking area, you can see a faint trail through the brush below, which is where I started. This part of the trail is little traveled, thick with weeds and not very appealing. So start walking instead on the El Fuerte sidewalk, and about 100 yards south of the pump station, you’ll see a Trailhead 1 sign. The trail from here is that wider dirt road, far more navigable.

It’s fairly flat for the first 0.75 mile or so, as it skirts that creek bed to the north side of the trail. When you reach a trail signpost pointing to the right, the trail then begins a steep climb uphill.

Very near this intersection is a large prickly pear cactus, a favored food source even today. Its flat and prickly pads are called “nopales” in Spanish, common in Mexican food, as are its fruits, called “tunas” in Spanish and sometimes known as cactus figs. This specimen was loaded with fruits, while another prickly pear elsewhere on the trail had almost none.

The prickly pear fruits must be carefully peeled to remove the small spines on their skins. They have been used in Mexico for thousands of years to make jams, jellies, candies and an alcoholic drink.

Erik Gronborg of the San Diego Cactus and Succulent Society presented a program in Balboa Park in early August all about the prickly pear’s botany and history. “The prickly pear was an important part of life for the indigenous people in America ...,” said Gronborg in his program announcement. “(It’s) even on the national seal of Mexico.”

When you reach the top of that incline, you begin to descend to the buildings along Melrose Drive and finally to a pretty park complete with flowing stream and picnic tables right next to the southern end of the trail at Melrose and Palomar Airport Road.

At this end, I simply turned around and retraced my way back.

The other highlight of this trail were the butterflies I saw on toyon bushes whose green berries hadn’t yet turned red (also called Christmas berry, the season when they are red). I saw a couple of different kinds of butterflies, some on laurel shrubs, and some even landing on the dirt trail.

When I reached that intersection with the Trail Head 1 to the road and the less traveled path through the weeds that I’d taken at first, I bypassed that overgrown path and headed straight to the road and back to the parking area.